Cataloguing Outside the Box: A Practical Guide to Cataloguing Special Collections Materials

Citation

Birrell, D. (2012), "Cataloguing Outside the Box: A Practical Guide to Cataloguing Special Collections Materials", Library Review, Vol. 61 No. 5, pp. 383-387. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531211280522

Standard cataloguing practice deals predominantly with resources that, whilst being original and timely contributions to their field are unlikely to be unique physical items – many institutions will hold like copies of the text and catalogue records which offer the most inclusive and trustworthy description of a resource. Such records are now accessible across institutions via shared cataloguing environments such as OCLC's Online Union Catalog WorldCat and copy‐cataloguing utility OCLC Connexion[1]. Cataloguing resources from scratch, therefore, many feel, has become a dying art.

However, before a record can be imported into a library OPAC or repository it must notably adhere to an internationally recognized bibliographic standard such as Anglo‐American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2)[2] which utilizes International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD)[3] elements for description, or the emergent Resource Description and Access (RDA)[4], designed for the digital environment and incorporating attributes of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR)[5] entities and whose datasets – not tied to a single encoding schema – offer greater flexibility in the description and discovery of repository content (Oliver, 2010). Data formats for electronic exchange, such as Machine Readable Cataloging 21 (MARC21)[6], underpin the structure, field designation and iterated content of each OPAC record; in addition, the choice of access points and form of subject headings must conform to controlled vocabularies such as those accepted by Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)[7] in order to facilitate classification and retrieval, whilst Authority Control serves to disambiguate author names, establish uniform titles and govern the library catalogue.

A typical record still requires thorough checking and editorial fine tuning before it can be accessioned, including the deletion of redundant fields, the completion of substandard or omitted fields and subfields, qualitative metadata enhancements, and re‐classification to locally adopted schemas. Cataloguing, therefore, remains an intensely analytical process which demands careful attention to detail and which is intrinsically linked to the subject analysis and schematic classification of both material publications and electronic resources.

Archival documents and special collections materials such as manuscripts, letters and diaries are, on the other hand, unique items. Other than, for example, collections of rare books and periodicals, like copies and pre‐existing records external to the institution in which they are held are unlikely to be available. They are the rich, often irreplaceable, primary resources which render any institutional collection distinct and which can foster exceptional, internationally renowned research. It is for this reason that, across the HE sector, the cataloguing of so‐called “hidden collections” has become a priority in recent years. Time and resources for the training of cataloguers in libraries and archives, however, can often be in short supply.

A number of publications are attempting to address this gap in training provision with Cataloguing Outside the Box: A Practical Guide to Cataloguing Special Collections Materials (hereafter COTB) by Patricia Falk and Stephanie Dennis Hunker being a collegial and ambitious attempt to provide cataloguers with the analytical tools, levels of description, and examples of authority work necessary to create adequate to high quality records for items and collections of materials in unusual formats.

Both authors are experienced special collections librarians at the retiring sounding Bowling Green State University (BGSU) and whilst the majority of the collections at BGSU have been catalogued in OCLC, the authors acknowledge that, “some items, mainly the more specialized collections, will most likely never be catalogued in OCLC, owing to their nature”. The character of the collections in question ranges from self published music scores, sound and video recordings, comics, fanzines, nickel weeklies, various types of scripts and microfilm, to popular fiction, television scripts and press kits.

COTB is organized into eight illustrative chapters each of which consider the scope of the challenge confronting the cataloguer when presented with collections of popular media, specialist genres and their sub‐categories. Sample records are supplied which demonstrate solutions to cataloguing issues affecting fixed and variable MARC fields for each item type and format. Helpful concluding summaries are provided within each section which collate issues relevant to maintaining individual items and larger collections – such as tracing copyright and managing donor relations, and a series of real and fabricated exercises are included to test the keen‐minded cataloguer. A further chapter pays specific attention to the challenges of creating authority records for such unique sets of holdings although the list of reference materials advanced to aid the creation of name authority files for unusual, self‐published periodicals or unrecorded radio scripts seems wanting, weighted as it is towards established mainstream publications.

Of course, a range of international standards for record creation already exist to direct archivists and special collections librarians such as Describing Archives: A Content Standard (ACS)[8], Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books) (DCRM(B))[9], General International Standard for Archival Description (ISAD(G))[10], International Standard Archival Authority Record (for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families) (ISAAR/ISAAR(CPF))[11], Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Manuscripts (AMREMM)[12], alongside more recent tools for creating and publishing records in Encoded Archival Description (EAD)[13]. Additionally, studies have been undertaken (primarily in the USA) to evaluate the role of archives management systems such as Archon and Archivists' Toolkit (AT) in support of archival workflows[14]. The proliferation of international standards, however, does not mean that archival or special collections cataloguing escapes the intrinsic challenges of establishing provenance, original order, significant context, ownership, the implications of copyright, or evades the problem of cataloguing ephemera. COTB demonstrates that significant stumbling blocks arise amidst just such ephemera – where the primary source materials are of an unusual kind and where few or no cataloguing guidelines, precedents or sample records exist. With unique primary resources, then, comes the necessity of close scrutiny, practical research and additional training requirements for cataloguers.

The priorities of the authors chime significantly, in this instance, with those of Yacoob Hosein and Portia Bowen‐Chang (Hosein and Portia, 2011) of the University of the West Indies who, in their training of cataloguing professionals (to catalogue acquisitions such as the Colin Laird Map collection and the Michael Goldberg collection of postcards) concluded that “training is even more important for specialist cataloguers in today's digital environment with the advent of metadata, RDA standards and various mark‐up languages”, concluding that “the indigenous nature of the materials” produced a training need for original cataloguing, which requires additional levels of bibliographic documentation and research.

Although beyond the scope of COTB, the attendant problem of scaling up such a process to encompass larger collections is already being addressed within UK cataloguing communities. A recent issue of CILIP's Catalogue & Index (C&I, 2010), for example, gave special consideration to the challenges of cataloguing film and image collections. The contribution of Ann Cameron of The Scottish Screen Archive discussed the practical issues involved in generating metadata specific to unique non‐fiction moving image resources; whilst in the same issue, Simine Marine discussed the exercise of creating unified access points across a collection of artists' films held in three different formats. Both examples dealt with the cataloguing of resources where no secondary sources were available to aid description, and significant emphasis was placed on the use of La Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film or International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF)[15] cataloguing rules (with local amendments) to ensure the wider scale interoperability of original catalogue records.

Despite COTB's revisiting of first principles, arguably there is no such thing as cataloguing outside the box. The distinction drawn by the authors between general and original cataloguing, perhaps sets up an unhelpful, over simplified dichotomy. The distinction advanced is really one of cataloguing process, and this process is far more of a two‐way street than the opposition between original and copy cataloguing permits. As Cameron suggests, in the process of identifying unique film footage “a cataloguer becomes a detective, utilizing the local knowledge of colleagues or delving into books and websites”[16] – to a lesser extent, with its copious Dewey schedules and tables, Moys[17], local classification schemas and interrogation of online bibliographic databases, the same might also be said for the general field of contemporary cataloguing. Underpinning the most basic form of cataloguing is the application of bibliographic principles which render item description, origin, edition, and relation to different degrees and which serve the often divergent needs, requirements and expectations of diverse user communities. A bibliographic record is, therefore, only ever an entry point to a much larger network, the locus of a series of descriptive and derived relationships, the limits of which are ultimately defined by the user.

Significantly, COTB also helps to highlight the serendipitous contribution to research made by enlightened individuals and idiosyncratic collection policies; the collections at the Music Library and Sound Recordings Archive and the Ray and Pat Browne Library for Popular Culture Studies (BPCL) at BGSU were, we are told, developed by Bill Schurk and Ray B. Browne to “collect and preserve that which was considered trivial – if not worthless – by the academic community”. Such popular materials (often unjustly overlooked by scholarly research) such as periodical fanzines, vinyl LPs and 45s, VHS, CD‐ROMS, games, realia, occult materials, popular religion, advertising, and sports memorabilia now serve transatlantic, interdisciplinary research networks such as Middlebrow[18] (established at The University of Strathclyde) whose members include sociologists, musicologist and academics from the USA, Canada and Europe. Cataloguing therefore aids research and enables advocacy and outreach to take place through ensuring the exposure of so‐called “hidden collections” which, in turn, can spur their long term preservation and continued use.

In COTB the authors have produced a practical guide to the variables and complexities of cataloguing materials held in unique special collections formats and supply a useful tool to aid current practice and inform future training. It also helps to reveal that purely automated solutions to the myriad problems of cataloguing both general and special collections materials would be like perpetually going bowling in the dark.

Notes

Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) www.oclc.org/

AACR2 – www.aacr2.org/

ISBD – www.ifla.org/publications/international‐standard‐bibliographic‐description

RDA – www.rda‐jsc.org

FRBR – www.ifla.org/publications/functional‐requirements‐for‐bibliographic‐records; www.frbr.org/

MARC21 – www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/

www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/subject/

DACS – www.archivists.org/governance/standards/dacs.asp

DCRM(B) – www.rbms.info/committees/bibliographic_standards/dcrm/dcrmtext.html

ISAD(G) – www.icacds.org.uk/eng/ISAD(G).pdf

ISAAR/ISAAR(CPF), – www.icacds.org.uk/eng/ISAAR(CPF).pdf; www.icacds.org.uk/eng/ISAAR(CPF)2ed.pdf

AMREMM – www.rbms.info/committees/bibliographic_standards/amremm.shtml

EAD – www.loc.gov/ead/

www.clir.org/pubs/reports/spiro/spiro_Jan13.pdf

International Federation of Film Archives – www.fiafnet.org/uk/

“Approaches to cataloguing moving image: some practical experiences”, Ann Cameron (C&I, 2010)

www.library.uow.edu.au/eresources/UOW026516.html

www.middlebrow‐network.com/